Sam Altman says the AI talent war is a bet that a ‘medium-sized handful of people’ will make superintelligence breakthroughs

And the cutthroat competition doesn’t look like it will ease anytime soon.

“Definitely this is the most intense talent market I have seen in my career,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC on Friday. “But if you think about the economic value being created by these people and how much we’re spending on compute, you know, maybe the market stays like this. I’m not I’m not totally sure what’s gonna happen, but it is a crazy intense comp for a very small number of people right now.”

Exactly how small is that group of people, and what do they know that others don’t, CNBC’s Andrew Sorkin asked.

“The bet, the hope is they know how to discover the remaining ideas to get to superintelligence—that there are going to be a handful of algorithmic ideas and, you know, medium-sized handful of people who can figure them out,” Altman replied.

That would help explain the astronomical amounts companies are willing to spend to poach AI talent, with one offer reportedly topping $1 billion.

Altman said in June that Meta had been making “giant offers to a lot of people on our team,” some totaling “$100 million signing bonuses and more than that [in] compensation per year.”

Meta is also investing $14.3 billion in Scale and hired the startup’s CEO, Alexandr Wang, for a superintelligence team.

While immense fortunes are being thrown at a handful of top engineers, Altman estimated the number of people smart enough to make superintelligence breakthroughs is actually much, much larger.

“I bet it’s much bigger than people think, but you know some companies in the space have decided that they’re going to go after a few shiny names,” he told CNBC. “I think there’s probably many thousands of people that we could find and probably tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in the world that are capable of doing this kind of work.”